SOMETIME AROUND THE holiday season last year somebody—maybe Jim or Anita or Erna, although I don’t exactly remember which of them—said to me that I seemed so much stronger, physically and mentally, than they had ever seen me. Any one of those three would certainly know, because they had seen me when I was pretty much at my worst. When I met them I was in or just out of hospice care in Hinckley, was often back and forth to the hospital, and was still physically sick and fairly weak. I was mentally pretty broken as well.

But nearly four years later, when I heard those words—“physically and mentally stronger”—it struck me right away that they were true. I had come a long way since my rescue and had done a lot of healing since I was in hospice. What’s more, I continued to feel like I was getting physically and mentally stronger every day. This tells me that the process of healing after trauma keeps going. My process of healing from my trauma could well go on for the rest of my life. That’s fine with me.

Yet at the time I was kidnapped I don’t think I would have known what either of those words—trauma or healing—­really meant. Five years after my rescue I have learned the meaning of both words firsthand—up close and very, very personal.

Any physical injury that sends you to a hospital can be a trauma.

I had had plenty of those. I was close to death the day we were rescued. I climbed into that ambulance and was then in and out of hospitals for weeks. Doctors and nurses and “procedures” defined the first days of my freedom. Stitches, needles, tubes going into me, tubes going out of me—I had wounds inside and out. There wasn’t much of my body that didn’t require medical attention.

But there’s another kind of trauma too: the injury to the mind. It’s the injury that occurs when you’ve been through something so awful that you can’t really cope with it. The stress is too big to manage. You can’t keep up with what it’s doing to you. The horror of it takes over, and you just don’t have the emotional strength to sort it out.

All sorts of experiences can do this to people: sexual and physical abuse as a child, bullying, verbal abuse, having an alcoholic parent, kidnapping, violence. I actually experienced everything on that list, and I had tried to escape all of it all my life. I had reported abuse to the authorities, I had run away from home to live on the streets, and I had refused to break—even when Castro thought he had taken all my strength. But the experience of all those horrors had marked me. It had left its imprint on my body, on my mind, on my soul. And that imprint was affecting how I was managing to survive even after the experience had ended.

There was one thing I knew for certain: I could not undo the things that had happened to me. They could not unhappen. But I also knew I needed to find a way to live with that fact and move forward. In a word, I needed help.

Of course, I tried talk therapy. Twice. I was on my own in the apartment by then, trying to piece together a life I could go forward with, and the first therapist I saw gave me the impression that I wasn’t down or depressed enough. I remember one day telling her that I was actually feeling kind of upbeat about myself and my future. “Really?” she said. “That tells me that you may not be working hard enough at understanding what has gone wrong with your life.” I began to feel that it wasn’t worth her time to consult with me if I wasn’t completely destroyed.

That was not a good fit.

The next therapist I tried was male, and that was probably not a good idea for me. I hadn’t yet even talked to my male friends about what had happened to me, so opening up to this man was not going to happen. Also, he liked to place blame, and he particularly liked to place blame for everything that had happened to me on me. I was to blame for not getting away from my family. I was to blame for letting myself lose custody of my child. When I thought he was about to tell me that I was to blame for getting kidnapped, I decided I did not need to hear that and I quit. Cold turkey.

So for the moment, anyway, I gave up therapy.

I should say, rather, that I gave up talking to therapists, because the truth is I was doing my own form of therapy every time I told my story to anyone, and on the book tour that is exactly what I did—over and over and over again. I spent practically the entire month of May giving interviews, often several a day, starting with a Today show interview with Savannah Guthrie on May 5, which was actually the day before the book was officially released. To say I was nervous does not even come close to describing how I was feeling. I was sweating, on edge, trying like hell to picture everybody around me as a minion in Despicable Me or a Hostess Twinkie in overalls—my own method for reducing what overwhelms me to manageable proportions—and I was so terrified that I kept running to the ladies’ room. But Savannah talked to me one on one before the interview got going, so I got an inkling of the kind of down-to-earth person she was, and once the interview began, it was okay.

There were thirty-three more interviews for television, radio, and print as the tour went on, and I cannot even count the number of questions I answered before we ended with a Paris television interview on May 26, the end of the tour—well, of that part of the tour anyway.

It was the first time I had ever been out of the United States, and my first foreign stop was Toronto, Canada, which did not seem all that foreign. London, which came next, did seem foreign, and I hope my British readers will not be offended if I say I had more trouble understanding what people said to me there than I did in Germany or France. In both the latter countries a translator accompanied me, but I really needed one in London because I found the accent hard to follow, especially because everybody talked so quickly that I just couldn’t keep up. But it was exciting to be in London and to feel surrounded by history.

Germany came next: two stops, Munich and Cologne. I seemed to be allergic to much of the food, but I loved just about everything I ate and couldn’t stop munching. The centerpiece of my visit there was a televised interview with the families of several missing children. The people were all very loving and supportive of their children, but one of the stories told that night was so like my own that it simply blanked my brain. I had to get up and walk out for a few moments.

Then we went to Paris, with all those glorious monuments and everybody speaking that beautiful language. I was excited to see so much art all over the place, and I found the sound of the language ooh-la-la.

Even returning to the States wasn’t the end of the tour. After a little time at home in Cleveland, I was back on the road in August and September, when I traveled to Puerto Rico, and in October I had my first “professional” speaking engagement—not an interview but me making a speech about the subject I unfortunately am an expert on: abuse.

I also “talked” in other ways, the same ways I had always done when I needed a refuge and some solace as a child—by writing and drawing, through poetry and art. All these retellings of my story, both to myself and to anonymous audiences around the world, helped lift a lot of pain off my shoulders.

But I understood that although finding the words to describe what had happened was important and that each retelling seemed to lighten the pain a bit more, I still wasn’t healed. I had reclaimed my life, but I still hadn’t totally put the past in its place so I could live in the present.

What’s more, the tour was also super-exhausting. There were days when I did as many as half a dozen interviews—by phone or in person—one after the other after the other. I never wanted to cancel even a single interview because I was always sure there was someone out there listening who might need the help I could maybe give. But it was an awfully tiring schedule.

Some of the interviews were tougher than others. And one interview, in which a male interviewer on some radio show asked me what it had been like to be raped all those years in Castro’s house, made me absolutely furious. It was just too stupid a question for anyone to ask; coming from a man, it really offended me. “How can you even say such a thing?” I roared back at him. “How can you ask someone who lived through it to answer that? That is such an inappropriate question—I won’t answer it!”

That was the worst, the absolute bottom of the whole month and more of book selling. But it was all pretty draining. I was drinking too much, eating too much junk food, sleeping badly, if at all, feeling lonely in the middle of crowds, and in general going down an unhealthy and unhappy path. I knew it too—I couldn’t not know it. One day I just lifted a prayer to God, telling Him that I felt I was losing my way and asking for a sign that would show me I was on the wrong path. The next day I went off to do another interview, and a woman in the audience got up and told her story and described the exact feelings I was feeling. I took that as the sign I had asked for, so now I needed a way to find the right path.

I confided all this to my lawyer and told her that I felt I had to do something—make some sort of change—because I felt like I was losing myself on this wrong path. Somehow I think she got word to Dr. Phil. He had told me I could call him anytime, and he didn’t just say that as a throwaway line for a onetime guest on his show. He meant it. I know because we talked frequently about my “process” of healing, on both up days and down days. This is a guy I felt really cared about my life. I knew he cared because he had shown that he did—in words and in actions.

This is also a guy plugged into and affiliated with lots of “treatment resources,” as he calls them. One is Onsite, which runs therapeutic workshops, including for people who have experienced trauma. Dr. Phil recommended that I go to their center outside of Nashville, Tennessee, to spend time in their Healing Trauma program—and, in particular, because of my love of animals, to try the Equine Therapy program there as well. In fact, he and my lawyer made all the arrangements for me to do that.

I got on the plane to fly down to Nashville. I had a window seat, and next to me was a very sweet-looking old lady. We said hello to one another, and she told me that she recognized me from all the news stories. The plane took off and rose up and up through the clouds until we couldn’t see the ground anymore, just the blue sky above. I turned to the old lady and said to her, just out of the blue, “I’m closer to heaven now.” Just as suddenly she began to cry. “They are tears of joy,” she assured me, “because I’m so glad to be sitting next to an angel.” To be able to do such a small thing and cause such a big impact seemed to me a good omen for what was ahead.

An Onsite representative met me on arrival in Nashville and took me to the amazingly beautiful “campus” of the center. It was enormous. Massive. Acres and acres of green grass and clumps of high trees stretched across rolling hills. There was a huge, handsome two-story main building with a wraparound porch, red shutters, and a fenced platform on the top part of the roof. It all looked to me very much the way I thought buildings in the South would look. And there were several outbuildings, including a reddish-brown barn. I figured that whatever happened, this was a perfect place to spend time.

I was there for a month, and the days were full. Mornings began with yoga, deep breathing, aromatherapy, meditation, movement, acupuncture, art therapy—all kinds of different healing exercises and activities. There were games or activities that got my group—about fifteen of us in all—to trust one another and games that helped us build teamwork. And there were sessions for dealing with the effects of trauma in which, one after another, people told their stories.

As you know, I wasn’t all that keen on that sort of thing. I didn’t feel comfortable talking in front of a group of people. Yes, I had told my story a lot when I was on the book tour. But that was different. First, I was talking about the book; it had detailed the eleven years in Castro’s house, and I just answered questions about the events of those years over and over. And I was talking to an audience—mostly an unseen audience of nameless people. Here at Onsite we were all together in the same room, all right there, side by side, all harmed by past trauma. It was much more intimate and somehow it just felt different. “I don’t even talk about this stuff with my brother,” I told them. “Why would I talk about my issues right now?”

“Okay,” the leader said, “if you don’t want to talk about your issues, why don’t you tell us how you feel?”

“I feel crummy,” I said. “I feel like I’m being pushed to talk about my personal life in front of a bunch of strangers, and I don’t care for it.”

“Good process,” the leader said. I guess they were processing the information I had just given; I didn’t feel I was processing anything.

MEANWHILE I went to the first session of equine therapy.

I had absolutely no idea what to expect. There were about ten of us signed up for equine therapy, and we all hiked over to the horse barn. When I say “hiked,” I mean hiked. The campus was so big, so spread out, that it took a while to get there. But it was a lovely day. The trees were changing color, the sun was bright, and the air was cool. Sweater weather, where all I needed was a light cardigan to feel comfortable.

When we got to the barn the wranglers led all the horses outside into the fenced-in paddock where we were waiting. The horses started munching hay and grass, and then the facilitator, the person in charge of equine therapy, told us all to start interacting with the horses.

I had never ridden a horse in my life. I’m not sure I had ever been this close to horses before. But I love all animals, so I started petting the horses one at a time. They seemed nice and passive, a little less frightening close up than from a distance. “Okay,” said the facilitator, “now choose one of the horses to be ‘your horse’ for the rest of your time here.” Everybody started choosing their horse, based on color, I think, and I had my eye on a nice brown horse that was also fairly small. One thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want a huge horse.

But in the end “my” horse chose me, not the other way around. He was named Waylon, and he came up behind me and lowered his head to graze my face with his. I thought that was pretty cute, but I confess that I was a little scared of just how big he was—especially compared to four-foot-seven me. There was nothing I could do about it, though. Not only had he picked me, but he was also the last horse standing—and the biggest and tallest. Every other horse was now taken.

He certainly was a beautiful animal. Everything about him was golden—his creamy gold coat, a golden-brown mane and tail that flew in the wind, and beautiful golden-brown eyes. I was definitely scared at first that he would stomp on me. Given where both of us started, it wouldn’t have taken much. Of course, no such thing ever happened. Something quite the opposite happened.

I have always loved animals because they don’t judge you. They don’t criticize, and they certainly don’t abuse. I’ve said it before: the only animals that cause hurt for the fun of it are humans—no animal ever would. But still, when I first met Waylon I felt he was acting kind of distant from me. He had touched my face with his, but as we started working together, he seemed somehow standoffish. We were not communicating at all—until I finally realized that he was distant because I was distant.

The horse had it right: I was distant. I wanted to be distant—from everyone. I wanted to keep my story to myself. It had been enough to write the book to an audience of people I couldn’t see and would never meet. I didn’t want to deal with this anymore; I just wanted to move on.

Understand that I never rode this horse. I never got on his back at all the whole time I was there. That wasn’t what this therapy process was all about. The horse and I were one on one, on our own two feet in my case, four feet in his case, the whole time. I fed him, groomed him—I loved to brush his mane and tail—and mucked out his stall. I took care of him, earning his trust, and I cared for him, which gave me a great sense of accomplishment too. In return, he taught me patience, and he taught me to trust myself.

The therapy that being with horses provides—and the reason recovery programs like Onsite use horses—is based on a horse’s ability to mirror exactly what people are feeling at any given moment. They’re fantastic mimics. You know how good they are at mirroring what other horses are feeling. If you’ve ever seen a movie or a nature program about horses, you’ve seen how a herd of horses operates: no matter how many horses are part of the herd, they move totally in sync with one another. It’s because they’re prey animals, not predators, so they are all about staying safe, and staying safe means they need to be constantly alert to danger. Once one horse in the herd senses danger and starts acting nervous or antsy, every other horse in the herd mirrors that, and the feeling gets broadcast through the herd. The other horses will become agitated too, and they will run like crazy to get away from the danger, sticking together the whole time. It almost looks like it’s just a single animal running. So being able to sense what other horses are feeling is a plus; it’s an evolutionary advantage that reduces the danger that a horse would face on its own. That’s why they’re so good at it, so attuned to what’s happening around them. And it’s why it’s part of their DNA.

The amazing part is that where humans are concerned, it’s the same. Horses can catch what a human is feeling the same as they catch what their brother horses are feeling. Once a horse assesses a human as safe, it will accept the human as part of the herd. That’s what Waylon had done when he walked over to me, when he “chose” me. He drew me into his safe circle, and that was it: I was now in his herd.

People who have suffered trauma are alert to danger in the same way horses are—all the time. We can’t help it—it’s in our bodies. Things that are everyday sights and sounds to most people can be triggers for us, and when one of those triggers gets pulled, we don’t just remember what happened to us; our bodies experience what happened to us all over again, and we react to defend ourselves. I’ve mentioned that motorcycle helmets and cloth napkins and certain foods and smells were triggers for me; they could put me back in Castro’s house in a second and send me into a tailspin of fear and anxiety. When I first got to the hospice in Hinckley there was a Porta Potty in my room for emergency use, but I told Rachel and her husband that they had to get it away from me. It’s what Castro had given me to use when he let me “graduate” from using just a plastic bucket. There was also a rocking chair in the hospice. I realize now that’s a pretty standard item in a rest home for frail elderly people, but Castro had a rocking chair that he used for sexual abuse, and I made Rachel and her husband get the one in the hospice out of my sight. It isn’t logical, but it’s automatic. And that’s what my therapy with Waylon was going to try to ease.

Waylon could sense in an instant if I was anxious, as I was in that first moment when we met. I was downright scared of how big and strong he was. But he had walked over to me, accepting me as a member of his herd. When I looked into his golden-brown eyes and felt I was looking into the soul of a creature that only wished me well, I was ready to trust the program we were about to go through together.

The therapy part of the mirroring worked like this: in the various therapy exercises we were going to do, I could look at Waylon to see how I was feeling, and if I could change the emotion I was feeling, it would show up in him—in the way he was feeling. So looking at him and seeing his feelings was both an incentive for me and a guide for changing how I responded to the world.

For me personally, this was a really smart way to do the kind of therapy I needed. I’ve told you how, when I was growing up, I was always ordered to keep my mouth shut. I was told that “children should be seen and not heard,” and that phrase went through my head every time I tried to talk about something or express how I felt as a kid. I always worried that if I didn’t say a thing exactly the way people wanted me to say it—if what I said didn’t please people—that I was wrong or that I shouldn’t be saying it. Or, at best, that it just wouldn’t make sense, and no one would get it, and people would just see me a certain way no matter what I said and would try to tell me who I am. So it was as if talking—trying to tell others how I felt—actually took away my ability to make my own choices.

But with Waylon and the equine healing therapy, there was no need ever to try to express my feelings in words. What I was feeling just showed up in my body, for the horse to pick up on. This was the tool the facilitators relied on as they asked us to do various activities.

The activities were about helping us learn to trust or calming our fears of being hurt. They were about learning to love ourselves or having confidence in ourselves. In each of the activities assigned, Waylon would sense the effect every situation or every memory had on me and would react. There was no way to hide my emotions from him—he was my mirror. Whatever I could not control or manage or regulate in me would show up in him. I could only help him settle down if I took charge of my own emotions. In this way I would learn not just to manage my emotions but actually to change them.

The way it worked at Onsite was that there was a kind of track where you would walk your horse. There was a little bridge that took up the middle between the two halves of the track. One half, on the left, was safe space; the other half, on the right, was unsafe space. So when the facilitator gave you an activity to do—like telling the horse the story of your abuse—the horse shows what the telling does to you. If you’re shaky or afraid to tell the truth, the horse goes over to the unsafe space, and it probably means you’re not ready yet to tell the whole truth of what happened to you. But you’re going to need to tell the whole truth if you want your horse to settle and lead you to safety.

For me, it started with activities to try to build my confidence and to learn to love myself. I held onto a rope attached to Waylon’s halter, and the facilitator asked me some questions, and we started walking. I gave an answer that was in some way defective or unsound or incomplete—either I wasn’t telling the truth or I was disoriented when I said what I said or I was afraid when I was answering—and Waylon caught that at once and led us to the unsafe side. Then when I “corrected” my answer—paid attention and told the whole truth—he led me back to the safe side. As you can imagine, after a while you feel how important it is to dig down for the truth and get to the safe side.

There was one activity in which I had to get Waylon to come toward me but stop at my command. The idea of this was for me to experience saying no. It was to remind myself that I had the right and the power to set boundaries that others would need to respect. I could do that with Waylon because I knew he was not judging me. He couldn’t say anything bad or ugly to me, couldn’t and wouldn’t make me feel afraid or ashamed of what had happened to me in my life. I commanded him to stop, and he walked us right over to the safe side, then stopped, assuring me that the boundaries I had set were sound and strong.

Of course, one of the hardest activities is to tell your horse your own trauma story and let him lead you to safety. If he senses that your story isn’t truthful, that you are afraid to tell it, or that you’re not really answering, he will lead you to the unsafe side—until you change.

When I got that “assignment,” Waylon and I started walking, and I told him how I had felt as a child. I told him I had been abused. I told him about the many really bad things that had happened to me as a child, that multiple family members had hurt me. And as we kept on walking, the horse stopped, turned to me, paused, and it was like he was saying to me, You’ve got something else to say. Let’s get it said so we can go over the bridge. He meant so we could cross to the safe side.

And all I can tell you is that something came over me to tell him everything. It just poured out of me. My whole life. The abuse I suffered as a kid. My son Joey. The kidnap. The house. Gina and Amanda. Everything I wrote about in Finding Me and everything you’re reading about in this book about what had happened since I got out of Castro’s house as well. All the confusion. All the pain. All the anger. My lifetime of being messed up, of not knowing who I was or where I was going.

This wasn’t like writing a book or answering questions on television. This was talking to a being who got it and didn’t judge me. Not a being who was going to ask me why I didn’t find a way to get out of Castro’s house or would tell me that he or she would have done more. No questions were asked. Waylon was willing to listen; he knew how to listen. It was like telling my story through the horse. “All I know now,” I said to Waylon, “is that I define who I am.” And we walked across that bridge to the safe space, and it was done.

I can’t explain why it had come over me to tell this horse what I never directly told a human in my life—except that I knew he wasn’t going to tell anybody or hurt anybody or use me or anything that I said. And when he led me across the bridge to the safe space, I felt a whole new sense of who I am. My fears seemed to evaporate. I felt strong. I felt like Waylon had helped me catch all the pieces of me that were falling apart and that he and I in combination were putting the pieces back together.

The therapy with Waylon also made it possible for me to talk to the other trauma survivors who got together each morning. The more I listened to the others talk—the group included both men and women—it was clear they were all coming out of terrible situations. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, mental abuse, violence, crime—they had suffered many different kinds of pain that they were trying to let go of. Also, they knew who I was—they had read the stories or seen the headlines or watched the television reports. They understood who I was and accepted me for who I was, so they didn’t push me to talk. They just waited until I was ready, and finally I was.

I spoke up and said I wanted to share something. They all looked at me. “The first thing I want to say is that I had to learn to love myself so I can love others, so I can eventually have positive friends instead of negative friends.” And when I said that, everybody applauded, which was really good. It gave me encouraging feedback. “This is the first time,” I told them, “that I’m sharing my story with a group of people who are right here in the room with me, and it is because you are basically going through the same kind of thing I’m going through. And having people that know what you went through, people you know are on your side, people who are loving and compassionate, makes me believe I can do this. I can talk about my past and share my trauma with you.”

And I could, even though there were men there, which made it difficult, and even a person who had caused abuse, and at first it was very, very difficult for me to be in the same room with him. But I was beginning to understand that even people who are doing the abuse need help too.

Most definitely it had taken me a while to feel that I knew these people. For me it always takes time to get to know somebody, but as I listened, I understood that they were not there for what they could get from me. I understood that, unlike the therapists I had tried to talk to, all these folks had experienced some sort of trauma—and they too had not been able to cope. They knew what it felt like to have your life yanked out from under you. Like me, they were survivors, which meant they weren’t going to judge me. That said to me that they would understand what I was saying. I would be safe talking to them. Also, the rule there was: what happens here stays here. Once I grew confident about that, it was the last bit of safety I needed, and I opened up totally. It felt like the right thing to do, and it felt good.

I DID THERAPY with Waylon each week while I was at Onsite. Each session with him was highly emotional. Also pretty tiring. But I grew stronger each time.

One of the last times I saw him we did another activity that was very important to me. No rope connecting us this time, just a very light, narrow string of yarn. I was in the middle of telling Waylon how I wanted to help others who have been abused, especially children, and to give them a safe space too. Waylon suddenly bent his long, beautiful neck down to grab a snack and munch some hay, and the little string between us broke. Without stopping or interrupting what I was saying, I picked the broken string up off the ground and retied it, and we just kept going—Waylon still keeping us in our safe space. The moment seemed meaningful, as if to say there is always the choice to keep going, no matter what happens in your life, and there is always a way to reconnect. All the negativity in the world, all the abuse people put upon you can’t stop you. Every day is a new day when you can go forward. You can always fix a broken string.

For our final visit I was assigned to create a picture in my mind of someone who had hurt me and then try to transmit that picture to Waylon. Then I was to tell that person that I no longer feared him or her, that I couldn’t be hurt by the person anymore. In my case, there wasn’t just one person who had hurt me, so the portrait I made in my head was a multiple. It contained the various members of my family who I felt had hurt me.

I lined up the picture in my mind and waited for Waylon’s response, and when it came I felt I now had the power to knock all these people out of my life, to say no and to stand up to each one of them. I felt this as a sort of burst of strength—not the kind you feel when you flex a muscle but rather strength within me. I felt it was there to use any day I needed it. Strength that would let me control whether I will enter safe or unsafe space. Strength that would let me slow down and take time to be in my own head so I can find the power to overcome and rise above. That’s the kind of strength I felt flowing into me. If I had not felt my own power to control who I let into my life, Waylon wouldn’t have let me cross to the safe space. Even today, whenever I feel my strength sagging just a little bit, I think of Waylon, the horse who wouldn’t let me give in or give up.

The timing of that particular exercise was just right, because during the month I was down in Tennessee a whole bunch of “family members” came out of the woodwork. The publication of Finding Me had set in motion a whole new flurry of people showing up on television to claim they were my relatives. I had never met any of them, didn’t know their names, and could only guess what they were after in claiming that we were related. The guess was that, whoever they were, they were interested in money in some way—that’s usually what people are after.

I have no problem or embarrassment or hesitation in saying that a horse showed me things about myself that I needed to learn. When I arrived at the trauma center I wasn’t even close to loving myself. I felt my life was ending, and I thought nobody would care. All of that changed through my relationship with Waylon. I bonded with that horse in a unique friendship. Emotionally, I felt totally safe with him. At that time, in fact, I felt he was the only friend I had on earth. Yet what he gave me has made it possible for me to find other true friends—my safe circle—and, I believe, to build my relationship with my husband.

Waylon never pushed me into a corner where I didn’t want to be, and when I left him I made him a promise. I told him that I knew I was still hurting and that I still felt negativity from a lot of people, but I looked in his eyes and said, “I don’t want that in my heart. I’m letting it go.” I promised him I would choose positive ways to overcome things and to reach my goals. I promised to make positive choices, and I admitted that, even since my rescue, I had made some bad decisions, some dumb decisions. “I’m going to choose differently,” I said. “That’s a promise.” Then Waylon bent his beautiful head down to rest on my shoulder, and again he brushed my face with his. And it was like he was telling me that he understood. He knew I would be okay because he knew I was strong.

My month at the trauma center had been super-exhausting in so many ways, but when it was over I truly felt ready to move on in life. As I had told Waylon, I knew I would still have fears, I would still confront issues, and I would still have trouble building relationships. But I now felt I could handle all that. At the trauma center I had learned how to listen to my own voice, and I believed I had the strength I needed to build a future.

It was time to go home and get on with it.